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Intuit Founder Sings Praise of Innovations June
of Two Thoushand-Three
By
JAN NORMAN
Intuit produced one of those innovations with Quicken accounting software. Other game-changing innovations include eBay, Amazon.com and Wonderbra. "Wonderbra took a garment category where there hadn't been much change in a long time, ... introduced a product with five innovations, and soon they were selling a bra every 15 minutes," Cook said. To achieve game- changing innovations, he said, a company must upset expected beliefs, overcome its own ingrained beliefs, listen and learn from customers, customize its offerings and team up with experts. "Most important, choose carefully the company you keep. You have a choice; make no compromise on ethics." Cook rarely makes public speeches, but he spoke to hundreds of accountants for 100 minutes – the requirement for professional continuing-education credit at the 2003 California Accounting & Business Show & Conference at the Los Angeles International Airport Hilton. Cook, 50, founded Mountain View-based Intuit in 1983 and introduced Quicken personal- finance software in 1984. Intuit, whose other top-selling products are QuickBooks and TurboTax, now has 6,800 employees and annual revenue of $1.4 billion. Although Quicken and its later business version, QuickBooks, are often considered beneath accountants' skills, Intuit has found that when a professional accountant is involved, customer satisfaction for its software doubled, Cook told the group. One of the innovations Intuit is now pursuing is products that address needs of accountants, such as the ability to generate financial statements, to do work for specific industries and to work online with long-distance clients. In his speech, Cook used Irvine certified public accountant Danielle Hewitt as an example of Intuit teaming with a pro for QuickBooks Online. Hewitt said she has set up a separate bookkeeping firm called Invisible Accountant, which has attracted a new type of client and doubled her revenue. Intuit employees talk with 50,000 customers each year. Cook, a former marketing manager at Proctor & Gamble, used this approach before launching the company. He talked to people about how they paid their personal bills, the problems they had and what solutions they wished they had. Quicken was the result. Today, Intuit has 22 million customers. EBay is an example of a game-changing innovation achieved by listening to customers, Cook said. "EBay set up an Internet store and left it empty," he said. "Founder Pierre Omidyar spent all day on bulletin boards answering customers' questions and at night he built their input into his software." EBay now is the world's 23rd-largest retailer, with 62 million users. Amazon exemplifies the game-changing innovation that capitalizes on customization, Cook said. Amazon's software "remembers" what products each person looked at and bought in the past and calls attention to similar offerings.
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